Manitoba Arts Council Blog

The Artist: Angeline is a Winnipeg poet anticipating the launch of her first collection with Brick Books in fall 2016. She won third prize in the 2014 Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award Contest and was shortlisted for Arc‘s 2015 Poem of the Year. Angeline’s poetry has appeared in Prairie Fire, CV2, TNQ, Rhubarb, Room, Geez, The Society, anthologies, and her recent chapbook Roads of Stone.

Residency Project: Angeline will divide her time between final edits on her 100-page book of poems about mothering children on the autism spectrum and the creation of new poems about her Mennonite grandparents – playing with childhood memories, love letters, genealogies, old photographs, and images from nature.…

The Artist: Curtis Wiebe is a multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker. Identifiable by flights of the fantastic in settings of winter forests and prairie landscapes, Wiebe’s art is full of imaginative characters brought to life as puppets and elaborate costumes. He has won the award for best Manitoba short film twice at the Gimli film festival and has had his short films screened at festivals all over the world including New York, Germany, France, Israel and Serbia.

Residency Project: Curtis will be mixing different media with filmmaking techniques in a series of tableaux that feature the natural setting of Riding Mountain National Park as the backdrop.…

Ginny Collins is the artist-in-residence at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre (CNSC) July 21 – 30, 2015. Ginny is a playwright based in Winnipeg, Manitoba and a member of the Prairie Theatre Exchange Playwrights Unit. Her play Good Intentions was part of Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s 2013/2014 season. She is currently under commission by Prairie Theatre Exchange to write Revenge & Co., which was read in 2015 as part of the Carol Shields Festival. She is also being commissioned by Cercle Molière for a French/English co-production with Prairie Theatre Exchange. Her play, TheGood Daughter, was published in the Breakout Anthology and was Best of Fest at the 2014 Winnipeg Fringe Festival.…

Laura Magnusson is a Winnipeg-based multidisciplinary artist with a BFA Honours from the University of Manitoba. Her predominately sculptural work combines architectural and organic elements to create precarious narratives that investigate ideas of loss, memory, and worth.

Laura Magnusson

Magnusson on the Churchill River, photo : Kaoru Ryan Klatt

Had Cetus Not Held Her Breath, Plug In Gala, photo: Karen Asher

Had Cetus Not Held Her Breath, Detail, photo: Karen Asher

Residency Project

During her stay at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, Laura will produce written and visual content for an artist’s book which will examine her experiences in the region over the past five years.…

The Artist: Maggie Ross is a photographer who became a ceramicist, and then thought, “Why choose?” She received an interdisciplinary BFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in 2008. Equally passionate about community arts programming and community gardens, Maggie lives in Winnipeg (though her heart is in rural Manitoba!) and is an active member of The Edge Clay Centre.

Residency Project:Forest Bride is a new body of ceramic work exploring the ancient and inextricable connection between women, pottery, and plants. Maggie will be producing a sculptural piece using hand building techniques influenced by local traditional Woodland pottery production and decorated using flora and found objects from the site.…

Tracy Peters is in residence at the Deep Bay Cabin September 21 – October 4

The Artist: Tracy Peters is a Winnipeg-based artist who uses photography, video and installation to explore the ways that organic and human-built environments overlap. In the past year, Tracy has had solo exhibitions at aceartinc. in Winnipeg, the Comox Valley Art Gallery in Courtney, B.C., and The Social Studios and Gallery in Derry, Northern Ireland, where she has recently completed an international residency through a partnership with Void Gallery.

Residency Project: Tracy will create a new series of photo-lumen prints inspired by the decline and regeneration of a forest floor.…

Diana Thorneycroft is in residence at the Deep Bay cabin from August 31 to Septembre 13.

The Artist — Diana Thorneycroft is a Winnipeg artist who has exhibited various bodies of work across Canada, the United States and Europe, as well as in Moscow, Tokyo and Sydney. After teaching as a sessional instructor at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art for 25 years, in 2010 been focusing on her studio practice full time. Thorneycroft has gallery representation in Los Angeles, Calgary, Winnipeg, Montreal, London (Ontario) and Paris.

Residency Project — In 2012 Thorneycroft began altering plastic toy horses, and to date, has completed over 5 dozen.…

The Artist: Daniel Koulack a respected multi-instrumentalist and multi-genre performer in the Canadian Music scene. Daniel’s music can be heard on his two albums of original instrumental music for five string banjo Clawhammer Your Way To The Top, and Life On A String. Both of these recordings were nominated for Juno s in the Best Roots/Traditional category.

Residency Project: During his stay at Deep Bay Daniel will be writing new music for the five string banjo.

Meet the Artist: Friday August 28th at 2 p.m. at the Lawn Bowling Greens. At the meet the artist event, Daniel will play both brand new and old compositions for the banjo, and will discuss the unique properties of the 5 string banjo as well as his own “artistic process”.…

Freya Björg Olafson is an intermedia artist who works with video, audio, painting and performance. She completed a Master of Fine Arts Degree in New Media from the Transart Institute / Donau Universität in Krems, Austria in 2007. Freya’s solo performance AVATAR received the Buddies in Bad Times Vanguard Award at the Summerworks Performance Festival in Toronto and subsequently toured across seven provinces in Canada, four states in the United States, three cities in Ecuador, Iceland and Germany. To develop her work Freya has benefitted from residencies; most recently through EMPAC – Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York. …

Vincent Ho is a Canadian composer. Born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1975, Vincent Ho began his musical training through the Royal Conservatory of Music. He received his Associate Diploma in Piano Performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music (Toronto) in 1993, his Bachelor of Music from the University of Calgary in 1998, his Master of Music degree from the University of Toronto in 2000, and his Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Southern California in 2005. Since his appointment to the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra as composer-in-residence in 2007, Ho has presented a number of large-scale works that have generated excitement and critical praise.…

Danielle Sturk is a multi-disciplinary dance artist, choreographer, and independent filmmaker creating in documentary and experimental forms. Since 2004, her combined short films have been screened at over thirty film festivals and broadcast on CBC, Radio Canada, Aboriginal People’s Television Network, MTS TV, l’Office national du film du Canada (NFB), TVA (Quebec), and TFO (Télévision française de l’Ontario). Danielle began her career as a dance artist and choreographer, performing nationally and internationally from 1986-1997. A graduate of the University of Winnipeg’s Theatre/Film department, Danielle is based in her home town of Winnipeg with her partner and their four daughters, where she continues to mine inspiration from her immediate surroundings with their support.…

Lauren Carter is a writer of fiction, poetry, non-fiction articles and essays that have been published in a wide variety of literary journals, magazines, and websites. Her poetry has made the long and shortlists for several prizes including the ReLit Award, the CBC poetry prize, the CBC Short Story Prize, and THIS Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Lauren has a B.A. in English Literature and Cultural Studies from Trent University and an MFA in writing from the University of Guelph-Humber. In 2013 Lauren released her first novel, Swarm, about life in a post-oil world of economic collapse and social unrest, which was included in the CBC Canada Reads list of the top 40 books that could change Canada.…

George Amabile is a Winnipeg based author who has published ten books and has had work in over a hundred national and international publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry (Chicago), American Poetry Review, Botteghe Oscure, The Globe and Mail, The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, Saturday Night,, Poetry Australia, Sur (Buenos Aires), Poetry Canada Review, and Canadian Literature. He has won the CAA National Prize; placed third in the CBC Literary and Petra Kenney International Competitions; placed second in the Manitoba Writers Guild national poetry contest, “Friends”; received a National Magazine Award and is the subject of a special issue of Prairie Fire.…

Andrew Milne is the first artist-in-residence at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre (CNSC) February 18–March 7, 2015. Andrew John Milne is an interdisciplinary artist who works with new media, film, photography and performance. His recent work has dealt with the re-invention of alternative imaging technologies with photocopy cameras, mechanical hologram machines, and alternative projection devices.

Photo: Leif Norman

Photo: Devin McAdam

Photo: Jaquelin Young

Camera and Museum in Thompson

Residency Project

While at the CNSC Andrew will attend the Aurora learning course Winter Skies: Aurora and Astronomy in Churchill for the first week and will then spend the second week flying a small hot air balloon to document the abandoned research and military sites at Fort Churchill via aerial photography.…

Tanja Woloshen is the artist-in-residence at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre (CNSC) June 24 – July 8, 2015. Tanja is a dance artist and educator whose creative practice explores transformation and inclusive ways of seeing. In 2013, Tanja debuted a half-length dance work, Encounters of the Man Kind, a mythopoetic investigation of men and intimacy, inviting audiences to look at the relations between space and the body. Tanja’s current work explores the human relationship with nature and intrinsic wildness. Recent projects also include dancing for Lise McMillan, Sarah Anne Johnson, Jolene Bailie, Natasha Torres Garner, and Mia Van Leeuwen.

Residency Project

While in residence at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, Tanja will undertake research in preparation for a future dance production project titled Holy Wild. …

The Artist: Patrick is a Winnipeg-based artist who has an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal. He has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions across Canada.

Residency Project: Patrick will work on a series of paintings and drawings that focus on the natural and human-made landscapes of Riding Mountain National Park. His work draws on both direct observation and subjective experiences of nature and place. Patrick will explore the sites of work camps built for conscientious objectors and German POWs in the park, and look at how these have influenced its material and cultural history. He spends part of each year working as a tree-planter in B.C., and this experience informs a sense of the power and agency of nature present in his art.…

The Artist: Alison Davis is an animator based in Winnipeg. While she always produces work frame-by-frame, her animated shorts range far and wide in both subject and technique. From personal experience to fantastical worlds, narrative to experimental, digitally refined to entirely hand drawn, her works explore the vast imaginative and visual possibilities of animation as a medium.

Residency Project: Alison will be researching and developing a series of experimental, hand-painted, animated sequences on the subject of parasites, the process by which one organism uses the body of another to further its own survival while returning nothing to the host. Using parasitism as the focal point, the project will explore the porous, permeable and multi-faceted nature of the body and by extension the pliability of the mind.…

The Artist: Kelsey experiments using sound and moving image to investigate the relationship between identity, memory, and environment. The constructs produced seek an alternate landscape for either escape or active reflection, and take the form of installation, performance, recording, or single and multi-channel video.

Residency Project: Kelsey will be working towards a number of on-going projects, including a multiple-channel sound installation taking place at Video Pool (Winnipeg) in July using recordings of wind. As well, Kelsey will be exploring areas of geographical interest within the park to perform small sound interventions and document the results.

The Artist: Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Her second collection of poetry, Stowaways (Palimpsest Press), won the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry at the Manitoba Book Awards. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

Residency Project: Ariel will be working on creative non-fiction about urban forests. The essays use Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Forest, a never-developed tract of aspen parkland in Charleswood, as a springboard to talking about our attitudes towards urban/nature, from invasive species like purple loosestrife and leaping carp to urban adaptors like the coyotes living in our garages and the deer stripping our gardens.…

The Artist: Janelle is a professional contemporary dance artist and an educator based in Winnipeg. From Flin Flon, Manitoba, she is a graduate of the Senior Professional Program of the School of Contemporary Dancers and holds a BA Honours from the University of Winnipeg. Janelle is co-founder of TheDancePost.org and co-founder/general manager of Nova Dance Collective.

Residency Project: Janelle will be researching movement for a new contemporary dance piece alongside her dancer/collaborator, Hilary Crist, exploring the struggle of confronting oneself. Since the passing of her mother in 2012, Janelle’s obsession with the afterlife and the question of who we really are and where we are headed has haunted her.…

Riddle: what is the difference between an arts council and an arts council?

Answer: ‘Arts Council’ means different things when naming different types of organizations. There are, essentially, two types of arts councils whose activities are primarily different but complementary.

They are:

arts funding agencies

arts programming organizations.

Arts Funding Agencies

The Manitoba Arts Council is an arms-length funding agency of the provincial government established to award grants to artists and organizations in all art forms and disciplines, through such programs as Media Arts, Touring Grant for Organizations, Dance Creation Production, and Project Grant for Periodical Publishers, etc.…

MAC uses the peer assessment process to award most grants. That means that qualified artists and arts professionals make the funding decisions.

If you are a professional artist in Manitoba you can participate in this process. It’s a great way to serve the community and to get an inside perspective on how awards are made.

Who is eligible to assess?

MAC maintains an extensive database of potential jurors from Manitoba and across Canada. All professional Manitoba artists are eligible for inclusion in this database. If you’ve been awarded a MAC grant, you are already in our database and automatically eligible to be a peer assessor.…

A Breakdown of the Life Cycle of a Manitoba Arts Council Grant

By Diana Sefa

If you happen to be an artist or a member of an arts organization, you’ve most likely worked diligently on assembling a grant application, painstakingly double-checking that all requirements from the guidelines have been met. You’ve managed to submit your grant application by its program deadline date – so, what exactly happens during the wait-time between submitting a grant application and finding out whether it has been awarded or declined?

Here is the breakdown of the life cycle of a Manitoba Arts Council grant*: